Cameron McIntyre Receives $9.4 Million to Model the Biophysics of Brain Stimulation

Cameron McIntyre, a professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, received a grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) Research Program Award. By providing stable funding of $750,000 in direct costs a year for eight years, the award is intended to help investigators make meaningful contributions to neuroscience by allowing them to exclusively focus on long-term, rewarding research projects rather than continuously reapply for funding.

McIntyre and his team use Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for the treatment of brain disorders, with applications including movement disorders like Parkinson’s, epilepsy and even obsessive-compulsive disorder. The use of DBS involves the implantation of a small pacemaker under a patient’s clavicle, while wires carry electrical pulses from the device to targeted regions of their brain. Because every patient’s brain is different, physicians need to consider the unique 3D anatomy and electrical biophysics of the brain to plan the best approach for the procedure.

But McIntyre aims to make this process easier through the use of detailed computational models and holographic visualization platforms, which enable researchers to see a patient’s brain in three dimensions. By integrating anatomical and electrical datasets into a common visualization environment, McIntyre and his team can direct physicians about the best locations to stimulate and record in the brain.

They will advance this work with the support of the NINDS award, which will provide more than $9.4 million in funding over eight years.

“Intracranial recording and stimulation of the human brain are powerful clinical tools that form the basis of wide-ranging neuromodulation therapies,” said McIntyre. “However, for all of the clinical successes of technologies like DBS, numerous scientific questions remain unanswered on the underlying biophysics that dictate the patient’s clinical response to these therapies.”

The team aims to link the worlds of basic neuroscience and clinical neuromodulation to better understand stimulation and recording in the human brain. To accomplish this, McIntyre will use patient-specific electric field models coupled with electrophysiology recordings to precisely model and dissect the neural activity patterns they record with their electrodes. They will also use patient-specific pathway-activation models and electrophysiological measurements to explore which neural pathways are stimulated via DBS to more precisely understand their therapeutic roles.

“We’re on the verge of being able to communicate with the brain and have the brain communicate back with us, which will allow us to interact with many neurological disorders that we don’t currently have great solutions for,” said McIntyre. “We know that miracle outcomes are possible with DBS technology, but they don’t happen for every patient. Characterizing what did and did not work within the context of the individual patient brain with detailed models helps us better understand the underlying biophysics and subsequently engineer the next generation of therapeutic solutions.”